Supporting Awareness through Collaborative Brushing and Linking of Tabular Data

Abstract

Maintaining an awareness of collaborators' actions is critical during collaborative work, including during collaborative visualization activities. Particularly when collaborators are located at a distance, it is important to know what everyone is working on in order to avoid duplication of effort, share relevant results in a timely manner and build upon each other's results. Can a person's brushing actions provide an indication of their queries and interests in a data set? Can these actions be revealed to a collaborator without substantially disrupting their own independent work? We designed a study to answer these questions in the context of distributed collaborative visualization of tabular data. Participants in our study worked independently to answer questions about a tabular data set, while simultaneously viewing brushing actions of a fictitious collaborator, shown directly within a shared workspace. We compared three methods of presenting the collaborator's actions: brushing & linking (i.e. highlighting exactly what the collaborator would see), selection (i.e. showing only a selected item), and persistent selection (i.e. showing only selected items but having them persist for some time). Our results demonstrated that persistent selection enabled some awareness of the collaborator's activities while causing minimal interference with independent work. Other techniques were less effective at providing awareness, and brushing & linking caused substantial interference. These findings suggest promise for the idea of exploiting natural brushing actions to provide awareness in collaborative work.

Personal Augmented Reality for Information Visualization on Large Interactive Displays

“…Furthermore, users can easily lose awareness for what others are doing while working on a different area of the large display [36,43,60,81]. Gutwin & Greenberg [36] state that to maintain workspace awareness, users need to monitor each other's behavior, for instance by showing past interactions of others [37], incorporating visual connections between information [42], using ambient light [65], or embedding animation and off-screen visualization techniques [35,66]. Personal Territories: Studies have shown that users value a personal territory to interact with while still maintaining shared spaces [77,81].…”

Designing across map use contexts: a research agenda

“…Yet, a healthy level of interest in the topic persists in related disciplines such as information visualization and visual analytics (e.g. Chen, Alsakran, Barlowe, Yang, & Zhao, 2011;Donalek et al, 2014;Hajizadeh, Tory, & Leung, 2013;Isenberg et al, 2011;Mahyar, Sarvghad, & Tory, 2010;Wu, Convertino, Ganoe, Carroll, & Zhang, 2013). This is a curious turn of events given that the growth of Web 2.0 technologies such as Twitter or Facebook and VGI have arguably greatly increased the level of collaboration worldwide on geospatial problems.…”

Collaborative Dynamic Queries

“…In HCI, Isenberg and Fisher propose visual cues for group awareness in document queries and searching activities [24]. In InfoVis, Hajizadeh et al demonstrate the effects of awareness in tabular data [16], and Mahyar and Tory show the efficiency benefits of presenting awareness in linked common work (LCW) [29]. Results from these studies indicate that a group can benefit from sharing knowledge and understanding of activities that others are performing [19,24].…”

“…Results from these studies indicate that a group can benefit from sharing knowledge and understanding of activities that others are performing [19,24]. In certain instances, group awareness can also help avoid redundant work [16]. Evidence from these prior studies suggests that group awareness could improve group decision-making tasks by enabling the group members to share their intention in visual format and thereby reduce the communication costs required for establishing common ground.…”